He didn’t bother to look at her.
“You want to know why you’re wrong? Ask the soldiers. Better yet, go find a commanding officer in the Army and ask them if social networking has changed how they operate. They’ll bite your damn head off.”
A trace of curious yellow appeared in Knudson’s reds, and he turned towards her.
“Soldiers have a voice, Knudson. Do you realize how incredible this is? One soldier asks a question, it gets picked up by others, and soon it’s a big thing and our commanding officers have to give us an answer. They have to give us a good answer, one that’ll stand up if we beat on it to check if it’s true.
“And if they don’t? If they ignore a problem and pretend it’s no longer an issue? The soldiers won’t forget. We remember—we keep it alive. It becomes a part of us.
“This has never happened before,” Rachel continued, as she tried to ignore the hot red stain spreading up her dress shirt. “There have been armies as long as there have been civilizations, and this is the first time that soldiers have access to some of the same information that their officers use to send them off to war. Yeah, it’s a huge pain in the ass for the officers, but ask a soldier if they want to go back to how things used to be, when they went off to die without knowing why.
“You’re right. Information is control. It’s power… But that’s not always a bad thing. It’s a brave new world, Knudson, for better or for worse, depending on how you look at it. We’re all trying to find our way.”
She started towards the stairwell. Somewhere down there, someone had some Band-Aids, or a clean sock, or anything, really: she was losing a lot of blood. There was a tampon in her purse if nothing else turned up, but talk about an undignified solution, that stupid little string dangling from her fist…
“Peng?” Knudson said quietly.
Rachel froze. Knudson’s tone of voice suggested he was about to apologize; his emotions showed he would shoot her dead if he could get away with it. She looked over her shoulder at him, playing along with the niceties.
“Never lecture me again.”
“That better be a request,” she said without bothering to turn around. “Because it’s not an order. Not coming from you. They didn’t just give OACET access to new technology—they gave us the authority to back it up. I walked in here and took over Homeland’s precious little playground, and you can’t do shit about it, Knudson. If I exist because Congress thought that cyborgs were the only way to force the kids in the federal government to share their toys, then by God and country, I’m going to do my job.”
She walked off, telling herself that Knudson wouldn’t be stupid enough to take a shot at her when her back was turned, and besides, she’d be able to see it coming anyhow so it was not an issue and she was not getting woozy from blood loss and…
The hand rail is right beside you if you need it, Rachel told herself, her new boots ringing on the aluminum stair treads as she descended. But you don’t need it now, and you will not fall down once you reach the bottom. Yup, you’re perfectly fine.
The steadiness of the main floor was a blessing; she barely even noticed how the anxious orange of the crowd eased when her feet hit solid ground. Still, she needed to finish the job.
“I tripped and fell out of the window,” she said, as loudly as she could without crossing over into a shout. “If I hear any other version of that story, I will deny it, and I’ll have some strong words for the person responsible for that rumor.”
Above her, Knudson’s conversational colors shifted. Not towards the blues, as she had hoped, but deeper into the reds and blacks. He was not about to accept any favors, not from her.
So be it.
SIXTEEN
SANTINO WAS WAITING FOR HER at the bottom of the stairwell. The two of them began a slow circuit of the room, stopping to chat with each team they passed. It took less time than she had anticipated. Everybody was pretending to be engrossed in their work—there was a lot of awkward orange as they realized they had no idea how to talk to Rachel as if a showdown between OACET and Homeland hadn’t just occurred—and she and Santino were able to walk the store in no more time than it would have taken to run in and buy a gallon of milk.
When every person in the room had gone back to their jobs, he slipped her a wad of paper towels.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“My shoulder is killing me, and I’ve lost some of the feeling in the fingers on my left hand,” she replied.
“Shit.”
“No kidding. One more time around the building to prove to Knudson that he didn’t scare me off, and then I need to get this looked at.”
She made them take another couple of laps, just to be sure, and then they left the building.
“Think Knudson will try to throw everybody out?” she asked Santino as they reached his car.
“Not with Phil and Joie here,” he said. “They might not be as rude as you are, but they’re still Agents. He’s not going to try and pull rank with OACET so soon after you slapped him down.”
“Aw, you’re so sweet.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She pulled the paper towels away from her skin and prodded the bloody mess that used to be her left palm. Santino hissed through his teeth at the sight. “That’s the worst your hand has been all week,” he said.
“Google Maps says there’s a walk-in clinic a few miles down the road,” Rachel said. “They’ll put me right.”
“Don’t you want to go to the mansion?”
“I can’t,” Rachel sighed. “Jenny swore that if she had to stitch me up again, she’d dope me up and tie me down until I was healed.”
“I know,” Santino said, grinning at nothing in particular.
“I’m serious!” Rachel said. “Don’t you dare take me to the mansion!”
“I won’t,” Santino said. “I promise.”
“Thank you,” she said, and snapped off her implant to nurse a growing headache in peace.
They drove for all of five minutes before she felt Santino pull over. Rachel flipped her implant on and found they were in a run-down gas station, with Jenny’s personal GPS waiting a mere ten feet away.
“I will kill you,” Rachel said to her partner.
“I know.”
She kicked open the door of the car and walked over to where Jenny was waiting. The other woman was sitting in the back of her SUV, with yet another one of those little white plastic medical kits on the floor beside her.
“What happened to trying to keep a sterile environment?” Rachel asked, using her good hand to pull herself into the SUV. The engine was running and the cab was comfortably cozy.
Jenny glared at her through a cloud of heavily-irritated orange. “Don’t you try and pull that with me,” she said. “Take off your coat. You’re going to be here a while.”
This time, Jenny was not as gentle when she cleaned Rachel’s hand, or maybe the cuts were that much worse. Whichever the case, Rachel had to flip her implant off to keep the pain from jumping from her to Jenny until the anesthetic finally took effect. Then came the now-familiar half-felt tug of thread across her palm as the new wounds were closed, the stitches across the older ones inspected and tightened.
Jenny paused before snipping the last thread, and Rachel felt the quick rush of heat from rising steam. She turned her implant on to see Jenny dump the contents of a large vacuum flask in a metal pan.
“Jenny?”
“Hold out your hand,” Jenny said, a no-nonsense shade of earthy brown thick within her conversational colors of doctor’s whites. Rachel did as ordered, and Jenny slipped a thick cotton sleeve over Rachel’s hand.
Then Jenny returned to the box and took out a roll of powder blue tape.
“Jenny, no, I can’t do a cast. I need to use my hands.”
“Thermoplastic,” Jenny said. “Used to make casts with variable rigidity. I’m putting you in a light casing of flexible plastic, like a thick
fingerless glove. You get to keep mobility in your fingers and thumb, but your palm is going under wraps for at least ten days.”
“Jenny—”
“This is the compromise,” Jenny said as she shook the roll of tape at Rachel. “Your other option is to spend the next seventy-two hours under sedation in the mansion. Your choice.”
“Fine,” Rachel sighed. “Although you might want to brush up on the definition of patient consent.”
If Jenny was prone to swearing, Rachel was sure she would have learned some new words. As it was, Jenny bit down on her response as she dunked strips of tape in the hot water and wrapped Rachel’s hand in warm flexible plastic.
“That’s an awful lot of tape,” Rachel said as Jenny ended the cast halfway up her forearm and sealed the edges. Her fingers and thumb poked out from under the blue.
“Pretend it’s broken,” Jenny told her. “That’ll keep you from moving it too much. But if you really—and I mean really—have to use your wrist or your hand, the cast will bend to compensate.
“Now,” her doctor said, as she settled back against the wheel well, “tell me why the nice man threw you through the window.”
“Lots of things wrong with that sentence,” Rachel replied. “Technically, he isn’t a nice man, and that window was already gone, and…”
Jenny felt Rachel’s mood fall. “And what?”
“And, technically, he didn’t,” Rachel said. She let her fingertips explore the new weight on her arm. The cast had plenty of give to it: she felt as though she was wearing an extra-thick sock. “I think I threw myself out of it.”
“You think? Isn’t that something you’d know?”
“That’s the problem…” Rachel started, and found herself unable to go on. Jenny reached over and laid her hand on Rachel’s exposed fingers. There was warmth and concern, and quite a bit of love. Rachel sighed, then scooted across the SUV to snuggle up against Jenny. “You remember last summer, when Mulcahy let that congressman punch him? Because it would play better in the news if Mulcahy took the hit and shrugged it off, instead of flattening the congressman into a pancake? I knew Knudson—the not-nice guy from Homeland’s name is Bryce Knudson, by the way—was getting ready to take a swing at me, so I told myself to take the hit. And at the last second, I dodged.”
“Good for you.”
Rachel didn’t answer.
“Rachel?”
“I didn’t want to dodge, Jenny. I knew it would hurt, and I was okay with that, so it wasn’t the threat of pain that got me to move. It was just… One second I knew how things were going to play out, and the next, I had turned to take it on the shoulder, and that extra momentum tipped me out of the window.”
Jenny’s colors went yellow-orange in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“I know. No offense, but you’re not a fighter. Think of it like chess, where sometimes you have to take a beating to win, but… But today I couldn’t.”
Jenny wrapped her hands around her knees. “I see.”
“I don’t know if you do. When I’m in a fight, I need to trust myself. All of myself.”
“Oh. Oh!” Jenny said, finally understanding. “You think your implant drove you to move?”
Rachel nodded, picking at the edge of the blue tape covering her knuckles. “In the Army, they say that success in physical combat is the outcome of instinct and training. If something is overriding my training—if something inside of me is overriding my training…”
Jenny propped her chin on her knees, and her conversational colors weighed themselves against each other as she evaluated what Rachel had said. “How big is Knudson?” she asked.
“Huge. Not Mako-huge, but he’s over six feet and probably weighs in at 225 or more.”
“Okay,” Jenny said. “There’s a difference between a 65-year-old congressman and a combat-trained Homeland agent. And there’s also a significant size difference between you and Mulcahy. He was much less likely to get hurt than you were, no matter who punched him. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Now, let me see that shoulder.”
There was no escape; Jenny had already seen the tissue damage. Rachel pulled down the neck of her dress shirt until her right shoulder poked out. Jenny pressed down on Rachel’s skin with the ball of her thumb, then watched the blood move through Rachel’s flesh with a clinical eye.
“So?” Rachel asked.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d have said you were hit with a sixteen-pound bowling ball,” Jenny said. “What on earth did you say to him?”
“Little of this and that.”
“Right. Well,” Jenny said, “if you want my advice—and you should, because I’m the most brilliant physician you’ll ever meet—your last-second escape kept you from taking a punch that could very well have killed you. If this was caused by a glancing blow to the shoulder, I can’t even imagine what type of brain damage you might have sustained from a direct one to the head.”
Rachel’s heart sank. She found herself staring through the floor of the SUV at the asphalt below.
Jenny caught her mood. “What’s wrong?”
“The implant protected itself.”
“What? No. Don’t jump to conclusions. There are several reasons why you’re probably wrong. First, you’re assuming you lack common sense, and while recent events might prove you right,” Jenny said, poking Rachel’s new cast, “I’d still put good money on the likelihood you changed your mind about playing the martyr when the big, angry man took a swing at you.
“Next, I’ve been working on my biofeedback research for months. I have terabytes of data on how the implant affects physicality, and I have found nothing to suggest that it can take control of our bodies. Help us improve how we use them? Yes. Take control of them? Absolutely not.
“Finally? There’s nothing in that data to suggest the implant can think for itself. Even if it did give you that last mental nudge you needed to make you move out of the way—and I strongly doubt that happened—you had probably already come to that same decision subconsciously. Yeah, ‘you’ may be plural there, but that’s what we are, now. Plurals. In a symbiotic relationship, there is nothing selfish about keeping the both of you alive and well.”
“Except when it’s in conflict with what I have to do,” Rachel said aloud, and then opened a link with Jenny as their conversation turned to the inner workings of the collective. “You think I enjoy slicing myself up? My job’s not a nice one—I go up against some hard people, and I have to do it in a way which makes OACET look good. I wanted Knudson to hit me. I was antagonizing him so he’d slug me in front of a hundred witnesses, and they’d all go back to their respective departments and spread the story that the big bad man from Homeland was beating up on the tiny woman from OACET.”
“Isn’t that what happened?”
“Hm?”
“Is anybody in that room going to tell a different story? I mean, didn’t he hit you so hard you fell out of a window?”
Shit, Rachel realized. That’s exactly what happened. She flipped off her implant, and in her mind there was nothing but the sun.
“Penguin?” Jenny said softly. “Where did you go?”
Rachel took a deep, slow breath. She was going to break her vow about whining in front of her doctor, she just knew it… She pulled herself together and reactivated her implant, and Jenny flooded back into her head.
“What’s wrong?”
She tried to look at Jenny and couldn’t. Her vision was like breathing, really; it worked when she didn’t think about it, but if she concentrated on how, and when, and why? That left her gasping.
Rachel shied away from Jenny as she held out her hands.
“I can’t,” she said aloud.
“You can,” Jenny told her, and took Rachel’s injured hands in her own.
There was an almost-familiar tug of emotion as Jenny drew her out. Their walls might be different, but everyone in OACET had experience in building them… and in taking them ap
art. The presence in her mind that was Jenny stepped into Rachel, just a little bit, just enough to learn if she was welcome to enter Rachel in something more intimate than a conversational link.
She was.
“Do you remember how I damaged my eyes?” Rachel asked her.
Jenny nodded; Rachel felt the motion as if she had been the one to move, and had to steady herself. “Yes,” Jenny said. “But you never told me the reason why you—”
“Why I decided to stare at the sun for two days? I couldn’t tell you, because I don’t remember why. It just happened. Like dodging Knudson—it just happened!” Her mental voice broke on the last word. She wasn’t crying; she was long past mourning what had been lost. But she was terrified of what else she might lose, and went willingly into Jenny’s arms as she rocked Rachel like a child.
“I don’t remember!” Rachel’s voice floated in their shared space. “I crippled myself, and I can’t even remember why! I can’t live like this. There’s me, and then there’s this thing in me, and if it’s what’s driving me…”
“… then what else might it make you do?” Jenny finished for her.
Rachel nodded, her worst fear sounding somehow more real as the other woman gave it life. She was shaking so hard her teeth rattled together, and every time she tried to pull away, Jenny hugged her close and blanketed her mind in her warmth and strong waves of positive emotions—safety, belonging, love—as she let Rachel’s panic attack burn itself out.
It didn’t take long. This particular fear had left a well-worn track in Rachel’s mind, and she had nearly a year’s worth of practice in wrestling it to the ground. It took a few minutes for the tremors to stop, to push away from Jenny and give her an embarrassed half-smile. “Sorry.”
“Stop that,” the other woman said. “Come here.” Jenny reached out and gathered Rachel to her again. There was a long moment of tension, and then Rachel let herself relax.
Her nose was running, she noticed; Jenny was good enough to not mention the shiny wet spots Rachel had left on the knees of her jeans. Rachel grabbed the bloody towel off of the floor and smeared her face across it, like a toddler rubbing her nose on her favorite stuffed animal. “God, I’m such a wreck.”
Maker Space Page 25
